Crypto by Steven Levy How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy—the author who made "hackers" a household word—comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"nerds and visionaries turned freedom fightersteamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.

STEVEN LEVY has covered Google for more than a decade, first at Newsweek, where he was senior editor and chief technology writer, and now at Wired, where he is senior writer. He has also written about Apple (Insanely Great and The Perfect Thing) and is the author of the classic book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Crypto

Kirkus Reviews

The story becomes increasingly complicated into the 1980s, as the first commercial programs appeared—the RSA-backed MailSafe and the derivative yet hip Pretty Good Privacy (which was illicitly distributed online)—as the key players sparred with NSA over RSA’s criminal, espionage, and export impli...

The Guardian

Diffie & co saw that the conventional ways of achieving these goals - by physical signatures, for example, and the exchange of private keys via secure channels - would not be adequate for the coming challenge.

Publishers Weekly

The chief technology writer for Newsweek, Levy locates the heart of the matter in the struggle to balance the need for the most effective encryption possible with the government's need to decode messages that might endanger national security--a struggle in which privacy, so far, has prevailed.